Google Launches A Rival To Amazon’s Cloud Service

Google has now made Google Compute Engine accessible to everyone in answer to its rival – Amazon’s seminal EC2 cloud computing service.

It was announced on Thursday that Google will now give access to its Compute Engine to the subscribers of its ‘Gold Support’ program. It will be providing a 24/7 access to Google support engineers for a subscription amount of $400 per month.

The Google Compute Engine is an online service provided by the company, which will allow you instant access to virtual machines. Here, you will be able to run any software you want to, including your entire website. It is similar to the Elastic Compute Cloud or the EC2 service of Amazon, which was the first to bring the idea of cloud computing mainstream.

The EC2 service is now popular amongst developers and startups among many others. A study reports that Amazon’s cloud runs nearly 1% of the internet, and Google wants a piece of this now very big pie. Google, till now, has been offering the services of developing and hosting your software applications without setting up your own machines through Google App Engine. However, there were limitations to this service in terms of the number of programming languages you could use and types of software you could develop.

Amazon’s EC2 showed that developers look for freedom to do whatever they want and not be restricted in their work. Google has thus come up with its new project of Google Compute Engine, and the early reviews of Google’s latest product have been quite good.